Guy Martin

by Guy Martin

  After winning a lot of races in the Support Class, I struggled for much of 2005, my second season with Uel. It was tough going in the National Class. Farquhar, Archibald and Britton were doing the winning. I was a top six man, if that. I was loving it, but I was out of my comfort zone. It was a hell of a step up from the Support Class. I knew it was going to be tough, and I never imagined I was going to be at the front, but by the end of the season I surprised myself by how much I’d come on. I had learnt a lot from the other riders. I learnt just how hard I had to push to stay in touch. I thought I was pushing hard before, but no. I was always strong on the brakes, but the top men would be berming kerbs and hedgerows, dust flying off their elbows and knees, and they would be hitting jumps much faster than I was before. It was bareknuckle stuff.

  The bikes would be getting so out of shape, but you couldn’t back off if you wanted to have a hope of winning. We would race every bit as hard as the British Superbike racers would at Brands Hatch or Donington, but the bike didn’t know where it was going because the roads were so rough.

  The other thing that meant a lot to me was the Irish fans. They would appreciate that I was over from England, committed to racing in Ireland and trying to make a go of it. Joe Coleman and Will and Rosemary Graham, racing enthusiasts from up near Cookstown in Northern Ireland, used to give me sixty or eighty quid every other meeting just to help lighten the load. And they weren’t squillionaires, but any stretch, just good folk who loved their racing. Me and Johnny were living on breakfast cereal or, if we were flush, the odd microwave meal we could cook in the truck, and we would go to the Grahams for a feed. We couldn’t wait to get round there. We were fed and watered like kings. Joe Coleman was their next-door neighbour and we’d go there too.

  When it came time to race, our truck, that was our home for much of the time between the races, would be loaded up with bikes. Then we’d leave on a series of little road trips. We had no insurance, no MoT and no tax. We’d been given red diesel and did not give a damn about any of it. We would drive this dodgy truck all the way to Scarborough and back like that, never worrying about what might happen if we got pulled over, and surviving because we never did.

  It was like the student life Johnny and I never had, because we’d become apprentices straight from school and stayed living at home. But it was better than being a student, because we didn’t have to go to university, we were getting paid and racing bikes. It was the whole carefree feel of being between adolescence and proper adulthood – with all the bills and worries that come with that – that made it so special. And we were doing what we loved. Johnny has said he looks back on those days as the time of his life, because it was just so simple. We had nothing to worry about and we were on this adventure.

  I managed to get an entry into the 2004 Isle of Man TT without having to miss another year and cut my teeth at the Manx Grand Prix. Back then, the TT used to want riders to race at a Manx Grand Prix first, but that wasn’t a hard and fast rule, just a recommendation. And I was ready for the TT.

  Me and Johnny drove to the Isle of Man straight from racing at the North West 200. Since then there has nearly always been a week of work between leaving the North West and travelling to the TT for the first evening of practice, but that year the Jurby roads meeting was being held in the North of the Isle of Man and I had an entry.

  There was drama before we even got to the ferry. We were driving to Belfast from Londonderry in the race truck that was fully loaded with everything except a tax disc, when we came to Glenshane Hill. This hill was so steep, and the truck so heavy, I had to brake going down it or the revs got too high for the diesel engine. For some reason I thought it would be clever to knock it out of gear and coast down, ticking over in neutral. The next thing, Boom! A tyre has blown out and ripped part of the bottom of the truck out. Luckily the only two people on board were both truck fitters, so we got stuck in. Uel sent a spare tyre and we got it fixed, slept on the docks and arrived at the Isle of Man a day later than expected, but still in time for the start of practice.

  The Jurby meeting is a race that’s hardly known even among road racing fans, but I remember it as being a big breakthrough for me. The track, near the village of Jurby in the north of the island, is wide, but it’s probably the roughest racetrack any racer of my generation will ever compete on.

  During practice I couldn’t hold on to the bike as the handlebars were trying to jump out of my hands, and I was thinking, ‘If I can’t cope with this, how will I manage in the TT?’

  Luckily the practice sessions were long enough for me to try a few things with the bike. I worked out that the bumps were coming so fast that the suspension hadn’t recovered from one pounding before it had to deal with another. This meant the forks and rear shock were getting backed up.

  When you’re working for a high-level team, like TAS Suzuki, you’ll have a suspension man from one of the suppliers – Öhlins, Showa or K-Tech – working with you, and it’s they who change the front or rear springs, the shims that let the oil flow past or the oil level. There are a thousand different variables. Some alterations require the forks or shock to be stripped to change them. I tell them what the bike is doing, then stand back and the mechanics are on it, changing the forks and rear shock in minutes. But there are smaller, but still very significant changes, that can be made with a spanner and a screwdriver. And this is what I set about doing between the practice sessions at Jurby.

  Not having a crew of experts, I had to work it out for myself that backing off the rebound damping might help. In very basic terms the front and rear suspension of a racing motorcycle is provided by springs that have their rate of compression and rebound damped by pistons moving through oil. If you didn’t have the piston and oil, the bike would bounce along like a pogo stick. When the bike wheel hits a bump the springs compress. By adjusting the compression damping you can set how quickly it compresses. With loads of compression damping the spring compresses very slow and therefore feels firm. A lot less compression damping and the suspension feels softer and spongier.

  Rebound damping controls how quickly the spring returns to the length it was before it hit the bump. If you push down on the seat or tank of a bike set up for a smooth short circuit (or a standard road bike) and compress its suspension, when you let go the bike comes up in a slow and controlled way. You do it on my TT bike and it rebounds a lot faster, almost at the rate of the spring, with next to no damping.

  The problem I had at Jurby was the frequency of the bumps, and the amount of rebound damping I had was causing the suspension to bottom out. There was no more movement to be had and the bike became close to unrideable. The suspension was no longer moving to keep the tyres tracking the road. Instead, it was just bouncing off it. Do that when you’re leant over going through a 100 mph plus corner and you can imagine what might happen next.

  When I wound the rebound completely off, so that after dealing with a bump the springs were as close as they were ever going to be to a pogo stick, the bike was transformed. The suspension would hit a bump and the damping would control the speed at which the spring would compress, but it would return to full length extremely quickly, with very little control, to be ready to deal with the next impact. Then the bike handled OK and I won the big race of the meeting and started thinking about the TT.

  One of the Uel Duncan team sponsors that year had a house on the Isle of Man and he wanted it painting. He paid me a tenner an hour and it took me two weeks. It’s on Bray Hill and I regularly look at it when I pass. I still try to line up a job like this when I’m over for the TT now. It stops me getting bored, and I can paint a wall while thinking through the race or a problem with the bike. Or I can just let my mind wander.

  For that 2004 TT, John McGuinness was the main man. He’d taken over that position from his good mate, David Jefferies, who had died after crashing in practice the previous year. McGuinness would become the leading TT racer of my generation. He was the man to beat, on the Superbikes at least – t
he races I always thought were the big prizes – that year and every other year I turned up to the TT. Of course, there were other great TT riders through all those years, the New Zealander Bruce Anstey for one, but it was always the big fella from Morecambe who I knew I had to beat to win a TT on the big bikes.

  McGuinness has the ability to always look like he’s riding to the shops, even when he’s on lap record pace. He also looks, especially now, like he could do with a couple of passes through the bacon slicer, but he proves you don’t have to be someone’s idea of a stereotypical gym-addicted motorbike racer to be fast. I think I wind him up, without even trying, but I don’t mean to. I have massive respect for the man.

  People have asked me if the death of the leading man and lap record holder, David Jefferies, affected the way I approached the TT. They wonder if I had thoughts like, ‘Well, if the very best around here can get it wrong and be killed, what chance do I have?’ But thoughts like that never entered my head. I don’t know if anyone was killed in my first year there. If they were it can’t have affected me, because I don’t remember it. I’m not being heartless, it’s just the way I approach it. I’m not trying to deal with the death or crashes in any particular way, it’s just how I naturally react. I can’t pretty it up.

  I was nervous of the task ahead, but not scared. I’d done massive amounts of preparation. In a weird way I think I knew the track better then than I do now. I knew the place inside out, from watching Duke videos of other racers’ onboard laps religiously to see what lines they took.

  I was doing five laps of practice every night and that helped me go so fast, so soon. Because the way they’ve changed things at the TT, no one gets five laps of practice in a single session now.

  My main mechanic was Johnny, and my dad was there too. Mates from Lincolnshire, Benny and Dean came over as well. I’d sleep in the back of the truck while the other lads would be out on the beer and then top and tail in the beds in the front of the truck, like sardines in a tin.

  One of them lost their key to get in the side door, so they were trampling over me in the back, sometimes with a bird in tow, pissed as handcarts at silly o’ clock in the morning. I wouldn’t be annoyed. It made me laugh. I miss that kind of thing, to be honest.

  My sister, Sally, also came over to watch. As soon as she got off the ferry she went up to Signpost Corner, on the outskirts of Douglas, and her first sight of me was braking like mad and overshooting the corner right in front of her. The friends who had come with her used to tease Sally, because she’d sit for the whole race with fingers on both her hands crossed.

  Despite that, I started the week well, coming 12th in the Superbike race from 24th on the grid. My first TT.

  I wasn’t like some of the newcomers who race now. Lads are racing at the TT who have never raced on the roads; they’ve done all their racing on short circuits. They might have done the North West 200 a couple of weeks before, but that doesn’t prepare you for the TT. I was nervous, but not over-awed by any of it.

  I had a couple of DNFs. I broke down in the Production 1000 – that is now the Superstock – because we didn’t put enough petrol in the bike. That year there were two 600 races, like there are now, but one was the Production 600, while the other was called the Junior (though there were no age restrictions – the name was a hangover from history). The Junior had the same rules as the current Supersport 600, so we had to change the engine between the two races. In one of the races the tilt switch, that stops the engine when the bike falls over, was faulty and kept cutting out every time I braked into a corner. We had a faulty switch in practice and changed it for a brand-new one – which turned out to have exactly the same internal fault.

  In the Senior I started in position 29 and finished seventh after doing a massive amount of overtaking, compared to what the front runners have to do. Setting off at ten-second intervals, if you’re faster than those in front you’re catching them and overtaking them. Dealing with that is a skill in itself. If you don’t overtake them soon, your pace drops to theirs and it’s a struggle to raise it again. That’s happened to me. You have to be ruthless, but you don’t want to cause a problem.

  I was racing a 600, a Superstock and a 1000-cc Superbike. Road racers are different to World or British Superbike riders or modern grand prix racers. Those fellas ride one bike all year, spending their practice sessions tweaking it in the tiniest ways to make it the least compromised it can possibly be. Real roads guys are racing three or more different bikes in a single day.

  At many race meetings now I’ll race a Superbike, with over 210 bhp, running on slick tyres. I’ll also race a Superstock 1000 on treaded tyres and the Supersport 600, a really trick bit of kit, with fancy ignition, but much less power and weight than the 1000-cc Superbike, meaning it needs a very different riding style. The Supersport 600 – that all of us in the team refer to as ‘the little bike’ – runs on treaded, road legal tyres, not slicks.

  Some of the other real roads riders will also compete on a Supertwin – the 650-cc, two-cylinder racers, like Suzuki SV650s or Kawasaki ER-6s – or 125s, little two-strokes.

  During that first TT, I had a big moment. I was on the straight before Glentramman, one that doesn’t really have a name, and hit the kerb. It’s a straight, but the bike got into a bit of a tankslapper. This is where the motorcycle is going more or less in a straight line, but the front wheel is shaking violently from one side to the other. It’s called a tankslapper because when the wheel goes from side to side, so are the handlebars you’re hanging on to, and they whack your arms against the petrol tank. Sometimes a tankslapper is so vicious it won’t straighten out before the next corner and you’ve had it. The bike obviously won’t steer when the front wheel is going mental. Other times you can loosen your grip on the handlebars and the gyroscopic forces of the spinning front wheel will bring it back in line. Little tankslappers are nothing unusual at the TT.

  Where this one happened was a section taken flat-out in sixth gear, as fast as the bike will go. Normally, I’d be right in the middle of the road, but because the bike had got a bit lively, and out of my hands, it had sent me off line and I was in the gutter, tyre hard against the kerb – but the next thing I know I’m back on line, going in the right direction, full on the throttle, wondering how I’d got away with it.

  I just thought, ‘Hell, that was amazing!’ I thought it was ace. From that moment I went even harder. It was the buzz of that near miss, of being so, so close to disaster, to be risking the whole lot, but getting away with it, that I’ve been chasing ever since.

  CHAPTER 8

  GETTING NOTICED

  ‘Perhaps I needed to be called a See You Next Tuesday and told to get my finger out of my arse and get on with it.’

  AFTER THE SENIOR, the main race and the last of the TT fortnight, I finished seventh and sat in the holding area, next to my bike – and it was my bike. Johnny and my dad had pitted for me all week and mates had given me a hand, but I’d done the engine, and it never missed a beat for the whole fortnight. I can’t remember who won the race, it was all about who finished seventh as far as I was concerned. It was a massive point in my life.

  I think about that TT a lot. I was fastest newcomer, even though I hadn’t gained experience by racing at the Manx. I was on a bike I’d tuned and developed with the help of my dad and Uncle Rodders. The feeling of satisfaction I got from that TT has hardly ever been equalled in my road racing career.

  I had done a 123-mph lap at a time when McGuinness upped the outright lap record to 127.68 mph – and I remember coming back and thinking, for a whole year, ‘Hell, I can’t go any harder. I can perhaps brake a little bit later here or there.’

  It took me a while to realise I was still thinking with a short circuit mentality. I’d used that on the Irish National circuits and it worked, because you’re in a mass start race and braking so hard for the road-end corners on a short lap. It was all about getting into these first and second gear corners hard and getting out of the
m fast for the high-speed straight between them. The TT is not about how late you can brake and how quickly you can get back on the throttle after a corner’s apex. The technique for the TT, and the Dundrod circuit, the home of the Ulster GP, is all about getting on the brake a bit earlier, letting go of it sooner and carrying the momentum. It’s a different way of racing a motorbike.

  During those two years with Uel and Robinson’s Concrete, from the middle of May to the end of the season, I was racing almost every weekend and I was loving it.

  I had started to win in the big class too. I won at Dundalk and Killalane. I did well at the 2005 Southern 100, but came in second behind Lougher.

  That Southern 100 is my favourite race meeting of any year, and that particular one was probably my favourite meeting ever. Johnny and Ivan Linton, who is now a road racer, but wasn’t back then, came with me. We got over there really early on a Monday morning and drove straight to the Sound, right at the bottom of the Isle of Man, where the Calf of Man is, and had a kip on some benches. I was woken up by an old grannie prodding me with her walking stick because she wanted to sit down.